Tag: Dziga Vertov

Back to the Future / By Way of Recursion

“Next on the block is ‘recursion,’” says the Narrator, “a concept discussed at length by philosophers Armen Avanessian, Pete Wolfendale, and Suhail Malik in Christopher Roth’s 2016 film Hyperstition.

“Recursion explains how the New enters existence,” says Avanessian. “Where reflexivity is a sequence of stacked meta-reflections, as in a pair of mirrors, recursion involves an integration of parts into a whole, changing in the process both the part and the whole.”

Roth employs cinema both recursively and dialectically. Parts of Hyperstition are thus able to speak to one another via montage in the style of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Godard.

So it is that Suhail Malik appears in the wake of Avanessian, arguing from the year 2026 that recursion is how those of us who code encounter time. “Recursion,” he states, “is what the operation of coding does when, meeting up against the inexorability of time, it tries to compensate for that inexorability and produce memory.”

HYPERSTITION from Christopher Roth on Vimeo.

Sunday February 14, 2021

There have been times in my life when writing is simply an ongoing process, happening alongside other happenings, author scribing in notebook, looking around, listening, learning. Connecting, transmitting. My scale is small. I’m no Vertov. But sometimes life happens in such a way that the hand moves. One evades capture in silence and solitude by conversing with others, mourning the passing of the great free-jazz drummer, gardener-philosopher, and healer Milford Graves. He and Derek Jarman inspire me. To them now I appeal. And like that, with eyes closed, I see the following. A wall of circles like the speakers at the center of the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound, the public address system through which they played. “Time fer some music,” shouts an announcer through the speakers. Henry Cow, innit? Aggressively proggy. Sarah arrives and trains me on the air fryer. Hurrah, hurrah. Delivery arrives with sandwiches. Hurrah, hurrah.